Harvest Pointe Methodist Church

Salty Christians

Jackson Daigre

If you have your bibles, turn to mark 938.

00:00:07

You know, it's really great I get to see my little cousin up here singing. I didn't even know she could sing until today.

00:00:16

Please stand for the reading of the gospel. Mark 938. John said to Jesus, teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us. But Jesus said, do not stop him, for no one who does the deed of power in my name will soon be able to do evil afterward. Whoever is not against us is for us.

00:00:43

For truly, I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose the reward. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me. It would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

00:01:09

And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than to have 2ft and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than have two eyes and to be thrown into hell where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. For everyone will be salted with fire.

00:01:34

Salt is good. But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus, thank you for your word.

00:01:49

We pray today that your holy spirit would come among us and fill our hearts. Give us understanding, Lord, in your name I pray. Amen. You may be seated.

00:02:02

If you were here last week, then you may remember that my father preached about the disciples and their selfishness. They were arguing about who was the greatest. In today's text, we see the same thing. The disciples tell Jesus that someone was casting out demons in his name. He started to think, man, you know, that's great.

00:02:21

Jesus ministry is spreading and it's growing, and people are using his name to heal people. But they told him to stop. And they told this man that he needed to stop casting out demons in Jesus name. Why? The disciples say it was because he was not following them.

00:02:39

Notice they said, the man was not following us. The disciples thought that they were also ones to follow, that they were in some secret club. That nobody could be a part of except through them. They obviously thought pretty highly of themselves because they had just finished arguing about who was the greatest, but they were wrong. Ultimately, Jesus is the one we followed.

00:03:02

We must trust in and follow Jesus himself. It is in his name that there is power. It was his name that the unidentified disciple invoked, but because he didn't go through the disciples, because they didn't know about him, because it wasn't the formal structure that they thought was set up, he was not apart as far as they were concerned. If we go back to earlier in the chapter, we can find another reason that they told him to stop. The disciples themselves had just failed to cast out a demon in the same chapter.

00:03:33

Imagine you're trying to do something at your job and you just try and you try and you try and you just cannot get it. And then somebody comes up and they just do it immediately without training. I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't think that that would make me like them very much. The disciples, they felt the same way in their minds. This random guy had just shown up and showed them up.

00:03:57

Their ego was hurt because they got selfish. Jesus responds by telling them to not tell anyone using his name for good to stop. Becaus

If you have your bibles, turn to mark 938.

00:00:07

You know, it's really great I get to see my little cousin up here singing. I didn't even know she could sing until today.

00:00:16

Please stand for the reading of the gospel. Mark 938. John said to Jesus, teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us. But Jesus said, do not stop him, for no one who does the deed of power in my name will soon be able to do evil afterward. Whoever is not against us is for us.

00:00:43

For truly, I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose the reward. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me. It would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

00:01:09

And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than to have 2ft and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than have two eyes and to be thrown into hell where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. For everyone will be salted with fire.

00:01:34

Salt is good. But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Lord Jesus. Lord Jesus, thank you for your word.

00:01:49

We pray today that your holy spirit would come among us and fill our hearts. Give us understanding, Lord, in your name I pray. Amen. You may be seated.

00:02:02

If you were here last week, then you may remember that my father preached about the disciples and their selfishness. They were arguing about who was the greatest. In today's text, we see the same thing. The disciples tell Jesus that someone was casting out demons in his name. He started to think, man, you know, that's great.

00:02:21

Jesus ministry is spreading and it's growing, and people are using his name to heal people. But they told him to stop. And they told this man that he needed to stop casting out demons in Jesus name. Why? The disciples say it was because he was not following them.

00:02:39

Notice they said, the man was not following us. The disciples thought that they were also ones to follow, that they were in some secret club. That nobody could be a part of except through them. They obviously thought pretty highly of themselves because they had just finished arguing about who was the greatest, but they were wrong. Ultimately, Jesus is the one we followed.

00:03:02

We must trust in and follow Jesus himself. It is in his name that there is power. It was his name that the unidentified disciple invoked, but because he didn't go through the disciples, because they didn't know about him, because it wasn't the formal structure that they thought was set up, he was not apart as far as they were concerned. If we go back to earlier in the chapter, we can find another reason that they told him to stop. The disciples themselves had just failed to cast out a demon in the same chapter.

00:03:33

Imagine you're trying to do something at your job and you just try and you try and you try and you just cannot get it. And then somebody comes up and they just do it immediately without training. I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't think that that would make me like them very much. The disciples, they felt the same way in their minds. This random guy had just shown up and showed them up.

00:03:57

Their ego was hurt because they got selfish. Jesus responds by telling them to not tell anyone using his name for good to stop. Because anyone who is not against us is for us. There is a lesson here. We are not the judge of others.

00:04:14

We don't see the heart. Only God does. All we can measure is the external. God knows not only the actions, but the thoughts, and not only the thoughts, but the intentions of the heart. Again, anyone who is not against us is for us and who is against Jesus, but the sin filled heart.

00:04:36

Sin is the opposite of God. It is a turning away from God. Division. Sorry. As demonstrated in these verses, sin divides, but God unites.

00:04:48

And division has been in the church of all places from her beginning. Think of the Corinthians and their various factions. One of St. Paul's primary concerns in the epistles is unity. So why the focus?

00:05:01

It was because there was division, and it is no different today. We don't have to agree with sin to let sinful people into church.



We've all sinned before, and the church is not a place for those who have no sin. No. We are a hospital for the sick. The church is not for the sinless, but the sinner.

00:00:15

The one who recognizes they are sick and in need of a savior. That is who the church is for. The church is for people who know their desperate need of a savior and a healer. It's not about keeping people out, but inviting people into this holy hospital. And as my dad says, the church is one of the only organizations in the world that exists for the people who are not in this room.

00:00:39

We're not called to have secret club meetings every week. The church's doors are meant to be open to all this desire for prestige and honor. Being elite is a desire coming from selfishness. Sin is selfishness. In the middle of sin is I.

00:00:57

It is that inward turning, looking at yourself, that self concern. Sin is putting yourself in the center. It is to love yourself above others and even above God. And when you really consider it, pride is at the heart of all sinning. Think of envy.

00:01:17

That is, having the pride, of thinking I should have, that I deserve that. And the same goes for stealing and greed. Pride was the first sin. Satan fell because of pride and Eve fell because of pride. Satan wanted to be God, and Eve wanted to be like God.

00:01:36

Pride is even recognized as one of the seven deadly sins. And what do you see when you look in the middle of pride? But I is all about me. Me. Pride is turning towards yourself and thinking, you are better, greater.

00:01:53

It puts an emphasis on loving oneself over all other relationships. You may be saying, you know, I thought it was good to love ourselves, and you'd be right. It is good to love ourselves. What is not good is putting ourself before God and before others, and putting ourself in the center of our decision making and putting ourselves over all relationships, because that is what sin is. But our culture has taken the first sin and greatest sin and created a whole month to celebrate it.

00:02:26

It's mockery. Sin always mocks God's way. Our culture has done this a lot with sin. They have normalized it, but it is not normal. It is a perversion of what God has created to be natural.

00:02:39

Sin is a lot more serious than what our culture makes it out to be. This becomes clear in our text today. Jesus says that if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. He then uses a few variations of this to just truly show how serious it is to sin and just how serious of a matter hell is. Some people don't even believe in hell.

00:02:59

Let me tell you today, hell is real. And as Jesus says, it is an unquenchable fire. He also says that if you cause one of these little ones to sin, then it would be better for you to be thrown into the ocean with a millstone around your neck. It really puts into perspective just how serious Jesus is about sin. It is not something to play around with.

00:03:22

It is not something you want in your life, because the enemy, he comes to steal, kill, and destroy. And let me tell you, if you let him, he will do it.

00:03:33

Now, when Jesus says that if your hand causes you to sin, he's not being literal, okay? Don't go home today and cut off your hand. Unfortunately, there are cases of that. My cousin Harrison, I love him. But last week I was telling him about what I was going to preach on, and he told me that he would cut his hand off and get a robotic one like what Luke Skywalker had in Star Wars.

00:03:57

I don't really think that's what Jesus had in mind. Bionic hands and feet are not the point. Instead, he was speaking hyperbolically, which is an exaggerated statement not meant to be taken literally.

00:04:11

But again, it shows just how serious sin is. Biblical hyperbole is figurative language that speaks to a spiritual reality, and the spiritual reality could not be clear. Sin is a serious matter that can cost us our lives. But thanks be to God, with his help, we can cut off these things in our life that drag us down. Jesus then says we should have the qualities of salt.

00:04:40

Now, salt, in the ancient world was used for two seasoning and preservation. And, you know, I was thinking about it. Salt is not selfish, because salt exists to preserve other things. It cannot preserve itself. You cannot salt salt.

00:04:57

Instead of preserving our own ways, we are preserving the ways of Jesus. And today we still use salt for seasoning, but not so much for preservation. Nowadays we have nice refrigerators and freezers. But up until recently, salt was used to preserve food. You can imagine that in the area Jesus was in, it was pretty hot because it was in the middle of a desert.

00:05:24

So food did not stay good to eat for long unless you put salt on it. I don't know if my mom would have made it very long in the ancient world because she does not like for anything to be left out. I mean, even if it's in the refrigerator, it can't be in there for more than two days. She's a bit of a germaphobe, if you've not heard. So if we have meat sitting on the counter for any longer than, like, 30 minutes, it's just gone.

00:05:48

I mean, it may as well have looked like the green eggs and ham at that point. So this preservation of salt caused it to become extremely valuable. Something being worth its salt is referencing how valuable it is. So having the qualities of salt means two things. It is to preserve and to season.

00:06:07

Now, how in the world are we supposed to do either of those things? Well, first, it is only in Christ that we can be salt or light. And as Christians, we are called to preserve. We are supposed to preserve what is natural and what is right, preserving what is right from the bacteria of sin. Without salt, our world would become like green eggs and ham, bacteria filled and bade.

00:06:32

If we lose our savor as christians, then the world will turn towards evilness.

00:06:39

The 20th century was one of the bloodiest centuries in human history, and a lot of it happened in christian countries. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were deeply christian countries until they weren't. Think of all the horrors coming out of these two nations alone. Why? It's because christians lost their salt.

00:07:03

They turned the other way or even went along with what was rotten. They lost their way. And, you know, we look back on Germany and the Soviet Union as these terrible countries that killed millions. And, yeah, they were really bad. But today, since Roe v.

00:07:23

Wade, there have been over 60 million babies aborted, which continues to this day. In this so called christian country, we as christians have to be salting the earth and showing our light. Us being salt preserves the world so it is good and healthy and natural. Being salt has to do with seasoning as well. Salt makes everything taste better.

00:07:49

Without it, your food can become bland. We, too, are meant to be flavor enhancers of the world. We are meant to be peacemakers during conflict. The light in the dark, the joy in the sorrow and love in the hate. We are to return good for evil.

00:08:10

Whether we are salty or not, can be affected by our relationships. Now, I do not mean salty as in what me and Harrison used to get whenever we would play fortnite. Not the mad kind of salty. No, I'm talking about the good kind of salt. Not being at peace in our relationships with others can cause us to lose our saltiness.

00:08:30

Matthew and Luke go into a little bit more detail about what happens to salt that is no longer good. They say it is thrown out and trampled underfoot. So what you want is good, tasty salt. Salt that is bad is thrown out and trampled. But what about salt that is in the process of losing its saltiness?

00:08:51

Salt that is, losing its saltiness can be compared to lukewarm christians being neither hot nor cold, claiming to believe in Jesus but not living like it, showing up to church every week and then ignoring the preaching of the word, leaving Sunday for God and every other day. For me, this goes back to selfishness and pride. Because living for Jesus and being salt is selfless. We are to be poured out for others. When we are salt, it can improve relationships with others.

00:09:27

Salt heals wounds and prevents infection. So when we are like salt, we heal the wounds we make with one another and prevent future ones. Being like salt, we use grace and truth. We use them to heal the wounds. And just like salt, sometimes it hurts.

00:09:45

The truth often hurts, just like salt on a wound. And grace can hurt you, it can be hard to be gracious to other people a lot of the time.

00:09:56

And don't forget that you can lose your saltiness, you can lose salvation. Not like losing your keys, but more like losing your way. You can absolutely lose your faith and backslide back into the fallen, disease ridden world. Ezekiel 1824 makes this very clear. It says, however, if righteous people turn from their righteous behavior and start doing sinful things and act like other sinners, should they be allowed to live?

00:10:27

No, of course not. All their righteous acts will be forgotten, and they will die for their sin. When we become like this, we are no longer good. When we fall out of the faith, we are not still saved. We do not become saved one time, and then that be it.

00:10:44

We are not eternally secure until we are securely in eternity. As the scriptures say, we are being saved, and we need to be careful because salt cannot be seasoned. You cannot put other seasonings into salt to make it more salty, because salt is a seasoning. Impure salt is no good. Impure salt is how salt goes bad.

00:11:07

Having things other than Jesus influence your life will lead to destruction and away from the faith. If you've ever accidentally put sugar instead of salt, you know that it does not exactly make what you're eating taste better.

00:11:22

So how do we preserve what is good and right in the world? Well, first and foremost, we have to be grounded in our beliefs. Shaky beliefs only lead to confusion and do not have the same preserving effect. And the way we stay grounded is through reading the Bible regularly and learning and understanding theology. Another thing that we must do is to speak out against evil.

00:11:48

Now, don't be dumb about it. There are ways to do that. But we cannot live in a world that takes advantage of us because we won't speak up. We have to push back on ideas that are evil. Allowing evil to spread is the opposite of being salt.

00:12:03

If salt is to preserve and then allowing in corruption is not doing our job. Jesus spoke out against issues, so we too must speak out of because we are to be like Jesus, not being ashamed of God's good ways, his good creation. But let us not be like those who say good of evil and evil of good. No, we must be grounded in the word of God and in his church. We also have to season the world.

00:12:31

We are called to influence the world for good and not for evil. This calls us to be kind to our neighbors and our coworkers, our family, and kind to everybody, really. Colossians four six tells us that our speech should be gracious and attractive, seasoned with salt. We should not be focusing on ourselves in this. We should not be looking inward.

00:12:53

In today's world, we often find ourselves focusing on our personal relationship with Jesus, which, don't get me wrong, that is the most important thing. It's very important to have a personal relationship with Jesus, but we are not of the faith that believes. We can just go into the woods and live in a cabin, reading the Bible and praying all the time. Those are good things that we should be doing, but that is not our entire faith. Jesus gives us a command in the great commission.

00:13:21

He commands us to go, to go and make disciples of all nations. So we need to go, not just sit in our nice houses reading the Bible off our thousand dollar phones and our nice chairs. We should go to the less fortunate, those who need more than us. We live in the 1% here in America. Even our poor are often richer than people in other countries.

00:13:51

So there are plenty of people we can minister to. And remember, we have the physical poor, and then we also have the spiritually poor. We must share the love of Jesus with both. Some of the spiritually poor are often the richest physically. Church is a great way to participate in a communal gathering of believers.

00:14:14

Being in a church is to be a part of a community of christians. And our church here has plenty of serving opportunities. Greeting at the front door on Sundays or the serving hospitality, you know, like the food out there. Or think of hap. Salvation Army, Huntsville assistance.

00:14:30

Sorry, Huntsville Pregnancy Resource Center, Madison village and first stop, just to name a few of them. As James says, faith without works is dead. So works are not useless. Works are still important, which means it's still important to be salty. We cannot just ignore Jesus command.

00:14:51

No, we still must do the work of the Lord. But works do not save us. Instead, we are saved by grace through faith. Ephesians two, eight and nine tell us this saying, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing.

00:15:08

It is the gift of God, not a result of works. So that no. 1 may boast. So we're saved by grace through faith, but without works, that faith is dead. I like salt that is not salty anymore.

00:15:24

And when we do works, it actually increases our faith. Increasing our faith helps us with tests that we go through, because we do go through tests here on earth.

00:15:36

Paul tells us that believers works will be tested to find out what is pure. And this is done through fire. It is like the process of refining the precious metal of silver, which is a great example, because it just shows how valuable we are to God. When refining silver, it is heated up to where the impurities rise to the top, and then those impurities are skimmed off, and then the silver is cooled down again. And then the silver master will look over it, and they will continue this process until they can see their reflection in the silver.

00:16:11

This is just like being sanctified with goddess. Our lives start to get really hard, and we begin to struggle, and we feel the heat, and then we find that impurity in ourselves and take it out of our lives, and then it cools down again. And this continues to happen until God sees himself in us whenever we become a reflection of him, when we shine his light. But we cannot shine his light if we are too busy focusing on the order. Because the disciples here are worried about the order of who was the greatest and who was in their group.

00:16:46

They missed the whole point, which is that Jesus name was being spread. President Truman said, no limit to what we could do, or, sorry, there is no limit to what we could do if no one cared who got credit for it. Because when we care about who does what, we are being selfish and we limit the work of God. And that is not how we become holy. Instead, as John Wesley said, holiness is perfect love, both for God and for others, which can only be done by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.

00:17:21

However, this process is not just automatic. We have to put in an effort. We cooperate with God's grace. We have to plant the seeds of holiness in our lives. The James reading tells us how Elijah prayed that it wouldn't rain, and it didn't for three and a half years.

00:17:40

And then he prayed again after that time, and it rained, and the earth began to yield crops. If the earth began to yield crops, that means that there were seeds in the ground. The seeds or sorry. The crops don't just come out of the ground from nothing. They have to come from seeds.

00:18:00

So through three and a half years of no rain, the farmers continue to plant seeds and sow seeds in the ground. The dry ground, they just continue to plant. We are to keep sowing even when we don't see fruit. This is sometimes how prayer is. We feel as if we're sowing seeds in the dry desert ground with no rain in years.

00:18:26

We feel as if our prayers are not being answered and there's nothing happening physically. But spiritually, there's a lot happening, even if we can't see it. So we need to keep planting the seeds of prayer, because when the rain does come, it is much better to already have your seeds in the ground. We need to keep sowing the seeds of prayer and trusting the one who brings the rain. Because as James reading says, the power of the righteous is powerful and effective.

00:18:56

So let us pray. Thank you, Lord, for the guiding light that is your holy words. Help us as we go about our week to be salt in our communities and selfless in our hearts, preserving what is good in our own ways. In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.